The Ascent

Springbok said:

I really want to love this game.... The world they've created is superb and am enjoying the voice acting. The story is pretty typical (so far), but compelling enough.

However, I can't find a way to control the game that is enjoyable. KB/M is awful traversing the world, using skills, etc and controller alleviates all of that. The problem is, controller feels awful to me on anything other than the basic mobs. On bosses or elites I always jump back over to KB/M. The game is just flat out unenjoyable to me to play and it's a real shame because the world and atmosphere is superb.

Also, micro stuttering seemed to get better as I got further in but still shows up randomly and completely takes me out of the game. Would enjoy this more as an ARPG and not twin shooter, but obviously there are people that enjoy this as I've watched multiple glowing reviews. It's just not for me

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Have you tried burst rifles? I can't stand the keyboard movement especially when trying to move in and out of cover to take as little damage as possible, but I agree that aiming with the right stick isn't as smooth as it should be. Not just when compared to mouse aiming, I'm talking compared to other twin stick shooters. (It's probably not fair to compare this to Housemarque's games, but I can't help doing so.) Anyway, burst rifles solve all that because they have homing bullets, and they do more dps than almost anything else due to their near instant reload--which also saves you from having to spend any skill points on weapon handling.

And I have the same problem with stuttering on PC too. It was abysmal during the prologue then slowly improved except for every once in a while when a lot of shit happens at once... like say a boss fight. Can't deal with it, as much as I enjoy playing the game at 1440 ultrawide with FOV modded to 91.6 so I've completely switched over to Series X. I'd say 'until a patch' but I know I'll be done with the game before that happens.

Disappointed in this game. Looked fun and was hoping for a futuristic shooting Diablo, but the twin stick shooting is just not fun on Xbox. I admit I'm not great with thumbsticks, but this just felt spastic and a struggle.

Character creation and graphics seemed a bit lackluster, so thought maybe the system requirements were low enough I could try keyboard/mouse on my somewhat dated PC. But that seems unlikely based on reports here.

Gave up before experiencing any bugs, so that's a positive.

Seems a game like this would be an easy slam dunk.

I finished the main story and had a blast with this. I wish they had ray tracing enabled on the XSX but even without it the game visuals are very nice. It was challenging without being too frustrating in that whenever I found myself failing it was due to not having made the necessary changes to my gear / strategy. Once I experimented and switched things around / changed my overall plan I was able to succeed.

While the core development team is, indeed, 12 people they sub-contracted huge swaths of the development pipeline to a littany of other euro companies.

The story is largely predictable given the usual cyberpunk tropes, but they do leave themselves wide open for a sequel or continuation.

My only regret is that I never felt comfortable enough with the stats / game system to specialize my build in any meaningful way. By the end my overall stats were pretty balanced across the 4 main metrics and I feel like it should be possible to tune them more precisely if I had a better sense of the system as a whole. I kinda wish there was a New game+ mode so that I could pick up from this point with enough skills points to distribute that I could experiment with some options.

By the end my go-to build used an electric blast primary with a physical shotgun in reserve. For Augs I used the spider bots and piston leap and tactical was the healing circle. Before I switched to the electrical blast I was using a 100 round physical machine gun but paired with the augment that turns all damage into digital for a short time. This was devastatingly effective against the robots and the enemy cyberfreaks.

I am using RPG and the machine gun that fires explosive rounds that does fire and physical. RPG is great against everything with nice AoE damage and the machine gun destroys humans with a small AoE burn effect.
Maxed health and Energy so the starting super punch is doing 1200+ in a line also good against everything, it even staggers the large machines.
Also working on maxing reload speed but my machine gun already reloads so fast you don’t even see the timer.

Awesome world. I finished the main story around level 26 in about 16 or so hours, on PC. The controls really didn't bother me much. It makes sense to have wasd movement with space as the dodge roll.
My build focused on a crits with the healing nade, and the aug that lets you roll back damage. Crit build with RPG is crazy, I do somewhere around 1700 damage, in an AOE, with crits.
Once you get that small RPG Launcher it's pretty much GG, the bigger slower launcher is a screen clearer.
Was trying to 100% the game but there is quest in cosmodrome that shows on the mini map that I can't find the quest giver to.
I got to level 30 before calling it.

Getting used to controller controls, but was hoping for a couch co-op game to play with my girlfriend and she'll never be able to manage this.

Also, I kept dying on the first set of mobs. Like aiming right at them and would miss. Strange, because I had looked up controller mapping and was trying to use the left trigger aiming button. Only later in the tutorial does it say you'll fire over small enemies using it. Yeah, that was weird

A lot of dumb little things are annoying like that.

For instance, why have a system where you run over boxes, break them open, credits drop, and you have to run back to pick them up. Just make the gather range bigger or auto pick them up without having to circle back?

There is an augment to spawn a little robot to gather shit for you. Seems silly but it's handy in swarm fights as they can pick up health packs and such.

popsicledeath said:

Getting used to controller controls, but was hoping for a couch co-op game to play with my girlfriend and she'll never be able to manage this.

Also, I kept dying on the first set of mobs. Like aiming right at them and would miss. Strange, because I had looked up controller mapping and was trying to use the left trigger aiming button. Only later in the tutorial does it say you'll fire over small enemies using it. Yeah, that was weird

A lot of dumb little things are annoying like that.

For instance, why have a system where you run over boxes, break them open, credits drop, and you have to run back to pick them up. Just make the gather range bigger or auto pick them up without having to circle back?

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That's not for aiming, it's for firing over cover mainly.

I agree completely about the crates.

Game is basically not worth playing at the moment. I'd only play it in COOP and COOP bugs out continually. The controls are janky, long load-times, and lots of bugs. Core gameplay seems fun with friends (reminds me of an Aliens arcade game I used to play as a kid) but needs more work before getting further invested.

Raes said:

That's not for aiming, it's for firing over cover mainly.

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Yeah, as mentioned, I mistook it based on the controller mapping description of raise weapon and the fact 90% of shooting related games use that as some sort of aim/target and pressing it when our character is standing just looks like aiming. Then only later with one of many inexplicably slow tutorial popups did it make sense.

The actual cover and firing over cover system is shit, though, so they could have perhaps just used an aim/target button instead of trying to make elevation matter. Causes more issues than it adds to gameplay. Character forgets how to shoot near elevation changes.

Been trying to find a zone-out game to play while listening to podcasts, but this game is amazingly mediocre and half assed and just been boring so far.

And yes I'll pre-establish the game is actually probably great and I'm just needing to get good. And/or I only dislike it because I'm a fanboy of some other game.

popsicledeath said:

Yeah, as mentioned, I mistook it based on the controller mapping description of raise weapon and the fact 90% of shooting related games use that as some sort of aim/target and pressing it when our character is standing just looks like aiming. Then only later with one of many inexplicably slow tutorial popups did it make sense.

The actual cover and firing over cover system is shit, though, so they could have perhaps just used an aim/target button instead of trying to make elevation matter. Causes more issues than it adds to gameplay. Character forgets how to shoot near elevation changes.

Been trying to find a zone-out game to play while listening to podcasts, but this game is amazingly mediocre and half assed and just been boring so far.

And yes I'll pre-establish the game is actually probably great and I'm just needing to get good. And/or I only dislike it because I'm a fanboy of some other game.

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It's got some issues for sure, my own personal opinion is that many of them would have been alleviated if it was a PC/m-kb only game, but whatevs. I haven't run into any performance issues (3060 dx11 Ultra, getting 75+ frames on 144hz 1080p, no stutters) or bugs except for skins I pick up vanish when I exit the game.

The cover mechanic isn't very smooth, might have been better with a roll-to-cover option like The Division or something. But, the way you get swarmed crouching into cover isn't something you do for very long. It's more like, crouch while strafing behind cover to buy me some time. My top issue is the stupid map. It's awesome that the world is 3d, but using that map gives me a fucking headache. And if the "O" option knows the distance to my next objective, why can't that distance be displayed on the quest screen for all quests? Quests could be structured a little better, too. Like, I'm level 13-14, the main quests is level 13 atm, and I've got lower level side quests, and I'm like hmmm, this should be close to where I'm at, where the fuck is it? Also, fuck taxis. A 1000 bucks a ride? I don't care how many kids you have to feed, you mutant fuck. For the costs of a dozen or so rides I could probably buy one of those sweet vehicles that people park all over and leave unlocked for some reason. And cyberdeck upgrades, ugh. Let me buy upgrades, or put skill points into it or something, dammit.

That being said, I find the gameplay pretty fun, and the visual world and sound/music are awesome. The game reminds me a lot of the Sega version of Shadowrun, set in a Bladerunner meets Star Wars world. Just sucks that I don't see this game having any replay value. No random loot, no classes, no real build diversity. Would love to see what the Shadowrun team could do with this engine.

I don't do coop, but I could see that being a big draw for people if it worked. It seems like a lot of these issues could have been fixed if they had simply waited 1-2 months more to release it.

Having a blast with this on series X.

Played coop a bit with a buddy who's on regular xbox one, though, and it was an absolute shit show

Looks amazing. Really fun. Waiting a few patches to coop it though...

I love all the people complaining about KB/M controls.

It's a Twin-Stick Shooter.

The control method it's designed for is in the genre name...

Evernothing said:

I love all the people complaining about KB/M controls.

It's a Twin-Stick Shooter.

The control method it's designed for is in the genre name...

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Doesn't fucking matter what it's called. When you also release on PC it's the devs responsibility to make sure kb/m works just as well. Since only console plebs are guaranteed to own a controller. Personally, I prefer kb/m in this game over the controller.

I don't even remember seeing anyone complain about the kb/m controls (other than ESDF movement being utter shit compared to a fully-analog stick, but that's a hardware limitation that no game can fix and the whole reason why controllers aren't just for "console plebs").

The complaints are mostly about the right-stick aiming being poorly implemented compared to both mouse aim and other twin stick shooters. There's something about the aiming in this that just isn't smooth, on both PC and console. I've seen a video showing one particular example, if you spin the stick slowly around 360 degrees you'll see that it gets stuck at certain points. And just in general it's hard to do really fine aim adjustments, like if you sneak up on a group of enemies and try to put the laser right on one of them sometimes it just doesn't want to do it. You end up having to let aim assist do the job for you (or just use guns with homing bullets).

Right stick aiming is janky and weird. Thought it was just me being retarded, but started to really look at it. Found there seems to be dead spots of sorts at each straight position of the stick.

So, like, if I slowly spin the right aim it snaps to up as it gets close, then sticks there, then snaps to like 5 degrees past, the circles smooth until it snaps to the next straight full position.

Not sure if it's just how I use the stick, or hold the controller or a hallucination, but it's part of the reason it never feels smooth or accurate to me.

Vorph said:

I've seen a video showing one particular example, if you spin the stick slowly around 360 degrees you'll see that it gets stuck at certain points.

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I think this is what I noticed and tried to describe. Found I could aim decently on the move diagonally, but any straight up/down/left/right felt like the game was pulling my aim around, snapping/lagging, not precise, etc.

Tried to change aim assist and didn't change the effect much, but made it easier to kill stuff. So, not sure if aim assist is even assisting aim or broadening the firing zone where mobs get hit.

Never was great at these twin stick games, so thought was just me, but something abnormal seems to be happening.

Which sucks because game could be fun even as a shallow shooter, and co-op, but aside from the world and sound is not much going for it. Add to that bugs and weird quality of life decisions they made and it's another disappointment.

And no, doesn't mean much more than hints at trends, but is getting hammered in MS store reviews. Another Game Pass game shots the bed.

Testing it some. Run in circles slow enough and you can see the direction reticle actually glitch back a little when you pass up/down/left/right positions.

And running in a circle your character will actually start to run straight at these points for a second.

What has to get fucked up to cause that? Is there even a reason to snap/stick to those positions in this type of game?